At one point in my life I had two cats. Miss Trip and Peter Lake. Later, I had two kids. Claire and Jason. Now, I have two cats. Sid and Hunter S. Thompson.
Life is odd like that. The webs of mystery, spirituality, love, and this swirling of cells I call me, human. We’re all interconnected. We are all alone. In my experience God isn’t listening, or if he is he’s an asshole allowing this much trauma to continue on Earth. Oh… I hope these aren’t the start of the end times. (Banish the thought.)
I didn’t mean to alarm you earlier. Both of my kids are still alive and well. As we navigate the troubled new reality of the present, we’ve got to remember one primary fact: loving others is the point of life. Love = Life.
The cats, however, are what I want to explore here.
Life is a long series of events, mostly alone. If we are blessed, if we have settled, or if we are unhappily married, a growing portion of our lives are less-alone. Not “together.” We are always alone in our spacehip of the mind. Our bodies obeying some inputs, outputs, and entropy. Singular you. And over here: singular me.
For a few minutes, hours, or years, we can spend time together or not. The choice is mostly ours. I have experienced all of my trauma alone, first. So did you. I have spent a lot of time working to heal my internal pain, journaling, counseling, my way through the trauma. Releasing it to someone else. Prayer can only take a human so far. Human to human, the energies required, is the path to release and recovery of your happier self. Now, please note, this is my opinion. I’m not a therapist, doctor, or scientist.
Here’s the metaphor: If you could pile up a gold coin for every single day you have left to live, it might be easier to see the problem. At least when you are young and the pile is vast and transcendent. Now, imagine you are much older, your pile of coins is no longer a mountain, it’s a frighteningly small hill.
How valuable is each coin?
How long will we live? Will Hunter outlive me? I feel the tears instantly remembering my boy Peter Lake. A dark brown sable Burmese. He got me though my father’s death, my favorite sister’s death, the death of my first marriage, in into my second marriage. Peter even met both kids. I’ll leave out his tragic death to protect my ex wife, but Peter lived to be 18. It was the longest relationship with any being I’d ever had. He was my spirit guide. My confidant. My muse.
He was my mirror. My reflecting pool. Unconditional affection and cuddles. Warm purrs on both sides. Miss Trip died at about ten from complications following a swallowed object. Peter stayed beside me as my life nearly shattered. And shattered. Purr purr. He did his best to heal my heart, to give me hope and love. He was my …
What? What are pets to us? Semi-alien beings? Micro-sentient beings? Love bundles and licks? What? What do you think they are telling, teaching, giving, us?
How in this moment, typing… are the tears streaming down my face? How does that happen? Brian Eno Ambient 1 is on. Nag champa is in the air. And a memory of a dead cat brings me tears of joy/pain/loss and loneliness.
It’s almost inconceivable to have you hear, reading over my shoulder. I am grateful.
My two current co-pilots are a year and a half old. Doing their best to evolve and groove with me. Our journey is sweet. Maybe they are like cushions. Softening the blow of my daughter’s departure. “Busy. Love ya.”
I am learning a lot about how my perception of the moment is vastly different from others. Most importantly, how I imagine someone else was thinking in the hard moments, often I get it completely wrong. Walking in on my wife in our bed crying to a song playing from her laptop. I replayed that memory over and over in my mind. What was she crying about? What was the song? Did I miss something?
A few years ago, driving our son to his first rehab I had the chance to ask her on the drive home. “You remember this moment?”
She thought about it. Not really.
“Was there something about the song that triggered you?”
Not really.
“The song, Goodbye My Lover, is a pretty potent song, don’t you think? You’re saying you don’t remember it.”
Not really.
Damn. A huge reveal. Or a lie.
Either way, does it matter?
Our divorce was fifteen years ago. We would’ve never worked it out. If I take her story to be true, I have to acknowledge that her lack of emotional depth might be because she don’t pay attention to emotions. If I accuse her of lying, I’m seeking some kind of join between us, of the shared moment. That shared moment. As opposed to the shared moment, taking our son to rehab, we were having during the discussion.
I capture moments in time. In my family, I was the person who would stop everyone in the middle of a dinner or a swim party and say, “Let’s all connect for one second about how wonderful this very moment is.” Pause. And we’d all go back to being alone and lonely. Now, wait, I didn’t mean that to come off as flippant. Let me try again.
Sometimes, my writing is like trying to describe the coin of the day as it’s passing by. Precious moments. I learned to tune my ear for feelings living in the house of my father’s rage. (gulp) That one sorta slipped out. In a house with lots of trauma, each family member deals with the fear and anxiety in unique ways. As a young boy, I learned to disappear.
I studied to become a magician. I did magic tricks. I raged on the Pee Wee football field and hurt a few smaller boys. I studied hard, read a lot, and began to play with short stories in sixth and seventh grade. I had a copy of them until I lost a bunch of stuff in a storage unit fire.*
I see a lot of that young boy in my sixty+ self now. I am better about disappearing. I still try. I correct myself. I manage situations to not create the need. And… as I mentioned before, I am alone.
Sid is the namesake of my favorite sister to jumped to her death on Christmas day. Her love is always with me. She is the reason I am beginning to believe in melted time. Looped time. All time at once. I’ll come back to that. Sid, as a cat, is the aggressive seeker for affection. The first into the bathroom whenever I go there. The first to find me and my warm thighs at night.
Hunter is more mellow, lumbering. Hunter/Peter’s thing is to hug and play with my well-socked feet. He finds heaven in those interactions, so I give them, or share them, often. I recognize them. See, that’s the point. Part of seeing the gold coin of your life. I understand Hunter is a cat. We derive joy from being together. When he’s having a sock moment, I pause and engage with him. We share this joy.
Shared joy.
That’s the thing.
**wait a second**
On the tv in front of me, at this second, a song is playing, Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians: Section 1. This was Sidney’s song. She gifted me with the cassette of this wacky ass music. My mom was into it as well, as Philip Glass. I’m more of a Talking Heads and Eno man… Can others no longer with us, communicate with us? Could my sister, or my mother, who also loved this song, have influenced my playlist at this very sensitive moment? Eno was my choice for writing music. This song is something else.
Time is the space between us.
As I say hello to my sister’s photo or my mother’s painting, I am experiencing time and space from within my singular human “viewport.” As a human, I can only see this present moment I am living. I am limited in my physical time from birth to death. That is my window of time, my viewport on all of time. All of time is happening at once. I can only experience my infinitesimal loop within the vast cosmic loop.
But… and this is a big one, through alternative doors of perception… what if…
Back to Peter Lake. That love, that time in my life, that nostalgia is what gives me the tears. A release for the moment. An acknowledgement of the love of a pet. And the gift of my present pet, Hunter S. Thompson. A new Peter.
My daughter is no longer asking for money. I hope that wasn’t the primary tether. See, this is what I was afraid of, about myself. What if I have imagined this rich and close relationship with my daughter, but it’s not her experience? What if she doesn’t really know how to feel a deep love? Divorce erased me from 70% of her life. That’s unfortunate. I became the alt universe. Mom was the sun, moon, and stars. Emotional availability was provided by me in that house. My mom, their Nana, was also a huge nurturing and emotional support in my kids lives. Each of them has a tattoo tribute to “Nana.”
It’s okay if she gets the trophy. She was doing double duty for the absent mother. Together, my mom and I made our best efforts to develop affection and closeness. Together, in our 30% of the kids’ time, did more than… Okay, I don’t need to be mean.
My daughter seemed to join with me in our sadness at being apart during the early years of the divorce. This was before they had phones. We expressed our “miss you” frequently. Maybe it was me that was manufacturing that closeness. I know, she was a young girl, but follow me here. My memory of the time was that we “loved each other very much and wished that we could spend more time together, always.” That was my little girl. That is not my 23-year-old daughter. I may have manufactured the closeness. Now, she’s making her own money, she… Well, whatever it is, she’s choosing not to respond to me.
My imagination says it’s because of her brother’s immediate emotional threat. No one wants to get involved when an addict is addicting. She’s gone dark. So has my ex-wife and her husband, but that’s expected. My son is flailing in the spare bedroom of my house, even now. My daughter doesn’t want to talk about her brother, think about her brother, or give any emotional space to her brother, and by proximity, her dad. Again, my projection. I’m aware.
The cats have two furry chairs in the dining room where they often can be found. We are early in our relationship building journey, but we’re getting along famously, and I can say this with some authority, that both of me and the cats feel this way. Cats have infinite emotional availability. Trust and love habits will be developed over time.
Today, I spent my coin in quiet recovery. Stayed up too late courting my son via texts. He was going to come home and watch a movie or play music together. He never made it. He’s still asleep from wherever and whenever he went. It’s six pm.
I don’t hold it against Hunter that he can’t play music or enjoy a movie. I don’t hold it against my son that he struggles with emotions and the suppression of emotions more than most. He is like me. I am like my mother. I learned to court those emotions, to turn them into a crayon drawing, then into a story, then a song, someday a rock opera. I am trying to reconnect with my son, or reconnect my son with his emotions through music. We share music. He’s avoidant now, because music unlocks the emotion. You can’t have beautiful music without deep emotion. In the same way his mom shut out all memory of our painful past together, my son is pushing away his recent failures with 110% of his resources. There’s nothing left over for him.
Anxiety is not a pretty sight. His gun obsession makes is volatile and dangerous. He’s protecting his vulnerability with loaded weapons. Avoiding me whenever possible. Taking zero responsibility for his own bad choices. Seems as if someone else is making him not go to bed. He’d describe it as a symptom of some past traumatic experience as if that excuses the behavior. It does not. He is making the wrong choices over and over. Talks about wanting to get his nocturnal clock back in order the day before going on an all-nighter last night.
I can’t rescue him. I can’t really give him advice. I am responsible for my own boundaries.
Sid and Hunter are curled around each other on one of the furry dining room chairs. Steve Reich has cycled back on the playlist. Shit, maybe it was just me and my imagination. It wasn’t my mom or my sister; it was just some random artist associated with Brian Eno and the memory of all the times I shared this music with my mom and my sister. The viewport of my life.
I am learning to open up to the celebration of the love and time outside my current life’s viewport. With two cats along for the ride, in this timeframe.
Note to chapter: At the end of this writing a magical thing happened. Randomly, Spotify dropped the connection with my laptop. Some other artist came up on my laptop and began playing. I hit the “next” button on my laptop and something extraordinary happened. A new song started on the TV system, a Brian Eno track from Apollo. I wasn’t really paying close attention, and I kept writing, I was on a jag. The music was background noise. As I was back in the flow of the writing I started wondering if I was hearing things. It was like the music was 3D. Sure, it’s playing through my soundbar TV surround system, but something else was going on. It was like I was hearing two different songs, or something.
The same song had started playing on the laptop and on the tv. The same song but out of sync. I thought I was tripping out. I dug through the windows open on my laptop and stopped Spotify. The song kept playing on the TV with a less hallucinatory vibe.
+++
*That was a lie. My storage unit was lost because of my bad bill-paying habits and the opportunistic manager who vanished after the small claims suit was filed.
time space love
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